The present invention is in the field of methods, systems, and computer program products for a centralized universal resource locator (URL) commenting service enabling metadata aggregation.
Many web sites and web-based applications allow for user commenting, which permits visitors or registered members of the web sites or users of the web applications to associate self-authored free-text with other data. For example, solutions such as Disqus (DISQUS.COM) offer web sites the ability to surface a commenting widget. The commenting widget enables users the ability to comment on the web pages of the web sites.
Commenting is a social activity, meaning more than one user has access to comment on a web page, and there are no (or relatively minor) restrictions on what constitutes a “comment”—a comment is just free text. Thus, users often use variants of the same words in their comments. This is especially true in a system where disparate web sites with varying user populations with varying domains of knowledge and vocabulary feed into a central comment database.